Yesterday’s post ended with this image…

And now for a quick step by step of how I put this album together…

The chevron pat­tern was made using tri­an­gles. I punched out two sizes of squares and cut them into triangles…

Stuck the tri­an­gles to form the pat­tern and added machine stitch­ing. There is a whole lot of stitch­ing in this album, because I was in the mood to pull out my sewing machine and try out some new gray thread…

All the pages in this book are dif­fer­ent. I chose var­i­ous shades of brown as the base…

I adhered the pho­tos onto the card­stock, leav­ing a 1/4 inch extra bor­der on the left– for the spine of the book…

I added stitch­ing all around the pho­tos. You can see the reverse side of the pages, which has a cool grid for the embellies…

I printed out my quotes and day tabs. These are avail­able in yesterday’s Free­bie down­load…

After all the pages were done, I stitched the pages together to form a book. 8 sheets of card­stock, and these are heavy weight card­stocks, but it went very easily…

And here it is all done…

Four rea­sons why this worked for me,

1. I wanted it sim­ple, no time spent select­ing the pho­tos and pro­cess­ing them. Insta­gram and the photo col­lage tem­plate helped.

2. I am not good at mini books– there are too many options to do, and I always feel over­whelmed. By nar­row­ing my choices this process actu­ally went much faster.

3. I printed my jour­nal­ing instead of my usual hand writ­ten style. I had a lot to tell in this album, and print­ing it was a faster route– though I did use a hand­writ­ing font

4. I added a lot of stitch­ing. This might not sound easy, but for me it was. I am bad at adher­ing things down and waste a lot of time restick­ing ele­ments. By stitch­ing I made sure every­thing stays in place and it acted as a cool dec­o­ra­tive ele­ment as well.

Stay tuned for tomor­rows post!! ITs big one for me